In Fond Memory of Mrs. King

 Coretta Scott King died fifteen years ago today, on January 30, 2006. Thirty-five years ago, we at Seinan Gakuin University in Japan had the privilege of having Mrs. King on our campus and in our city. I am writing this in fond memory of Mrs. King. 

Coretta Scott King in 2003

Coretta Scott

In central Alabama on April 27, 1927, Obadiah (“Obie”) and Bernice Scott became parents of a baby girl whom they maned Coretta. Just two and a half years later the Great Depression began, and life was hard for many Americans and especially for a Black family in Alabama.

As a young girl, Coretta started tending the family garden, and by the age of ten she was working in the cotton fields. When she was 12, though, she enrolled as a seventh grader in Lincoln School in Marion,  ten miles from home. She graduated from high school in 1945, the top student in her class.

After graduating in 1951 from Antioch College in Ohio, Coretta continued her studies at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.

Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Kings in 1964

It was in Boston that Coretta met Martin Luther King, Jr., who was usually called M.L., and they married in June 1953. (Currently, Boston is moving forward with a major effort commemorating the Kings with a large 22-foot-high monument of intertwined bronze arms.) 

In the fall of 1954, Coretta and M.L. moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where he became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. A year later their first child, Yolanda, was born. Three more children were added to the King family, the last two being born in Atlanta in 1961 and 1963.

M.L.’s involvement in the civil rights movement led to the bombing of the King home in 1956, the year between the birth of Yolanda and MLK, III.

Widow Coretta Scott King

After years of anxiety about what might happen to M.L. and/or to her family, her worst fears were realized on that April 1968 evening in Memphis when MLK was fatally shot.

It was, of course, a time of great grief for her and her family, but also for the nation, except for the bigots and racists who had long railed against King and his clarion calls for equality for “colored people.”

After M.L.’s assassination, Mrs. King took on the leadership of the struggle for racial equality in the U.S. Among other things, in 1968 she founded the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, commonly known as The King Center,” which now hosts over one million visitors a year.

In 1985, Seinan Gakuin, the school system that included the university where I was a full-time faculty member, began to consider who to invite as a prominent speaker for the school’s 70^th anniversary to be held in May 1986.

As a member of the planning committee, I suggested we try to get Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa to be our speaker, and some preliminary contacts were made in that regard. But then someone came up with the idea of inviting Mrs. King. I thought that was a brilliant suggestion.

Mrs. King accepted our invitation. So, she came to Fukuoka City, spoke at Seinan Gakuin’s 70^th anniversary service, and also gave an address at a rented hall downtown. There were around 4,000 people who attended that gala event.

I was also one of a small group of Seinan people who hosted Mrs. King to a dinner one of the evenings she was in our city, and I was impressed by what a warm, genuine person she was.

Among the many university students I taught, many had negative views of Christianity partly because of the racism they knew was deeply rooted in the United States, even though it was, they thought, a Christian nation.

Mrs. King’s talks at Seinan Gakuin and in downtown Fukuoka City, widely covered by the press, were warmly received, and her unassuming Christian witness was highly beneficial to those of us serving as Christian missionaries in Japan.

So, today I am fondly remembering Coretta Scott King and thanking God for her lifelong commitment to peace and social justice.